A Conversation with Jean Shin and Nathalie Anglès on The Topic of Her Exhibition "And we move"
Wednesday, July 16, 2008 7pm
Free admission, Open to the public
at Location One 26 Greene Street (between Canal and Grand)

Jean Shin's current exhibition at Location One "And we move" is an installation that explores the nature of music and musical production by analyzing some of its fundamental structures: the score, the conductor, the magnetic tape on which is it is recorded. A site-specific work developed during her residency at Location One, "And we move" incorporates large-scale inkjet prints, magnetic tape, and a video projection depicting just the back of a conductor's shirt as he leads an orchestra, the folds undulating with each of his movements. We don't see his arms or the musicians, but the quiet passages and dramatic swells of the music (Ma Vlast (My Country), by Czech composer Bedrich Smetana, and Ibert's Flute Concerto) are expressed in the rippling shadows and folds of the fabric. The exhibition is on view at Location One through July 26, 2008.

Artist Jean Shin will talk about her work with Director of Location One's International Residency Program, Nathalie Anglès on Wednesday, July 16 at 7pm. The event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

Game artist Mark Essen, a.k.a. Messhof, will install five playable games at Light Industry, including two new titles: Stenography Hero, a competitive text-based stenography simulator in the spirit of Guitar Hero, and Rail War, a western-themed side-scroller projected in a Cinemascope aspect ratio.

Essen will present a short talk about his work during which he will upload Stenography Hero and Rail War live to his website for free distribution. Other titles available for play will include Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist (2008), Punishment: The Punishing(2007) and Flywrench (2007).

Filled with counterintuitive physics, chaotic game mechanics and bursts of strobing color, Messhof's work combines the essence of old 2D arcade titles--misleadingly cute single-player games that did everything they could to make you choke on that twenty-five cents--with the viewer-challenging puzzle-logic of avant-garde cinema.

The evening will also include a performance by Jordan Stone, who composed music for Essen's games, using bent toys, dying drum machines, and circuits of his own design to create distorted soundscapes reminiscent of 80s videogaming.

Cover yourself in post-it notes and become a digital puppet. Sit under the soothing sounds of wii wind chimes. Watch yourself travel back in time on video. Interact with a hotter, fitter 3D version of yourself. These are the prompts offered by the artists in "Double Take," an exhibition opening this weekend at Eyebeam with a promise to "challenge viewers to reconsider what we take for granted as reality in our technologically-mediated lives." A total of nine projects will be presented in the show which results from the Interactivos workshop organized by Madrid-based Medialab-Prado and hosted in New York by Eyebeam. All of the works were created collaboratively by an international group of artists, hackers, and tinkerers brought together under the premise of exploring "the blurry line between the real and the fake." But the interactive prototypes need your participation to bring them alive, so check out these "technologically-enabled illusions" between July 12-August 9. - Marisa Olson

Only a few years ago, it would have been a stretch to claim that net art owed a substantial debt to the history of avant-garde filmmaking, but the advent of video sharing has in many ways converged two heretofore distinct traditions. Given the enormous popularity of video mash-ups and artistic remixing, we must therefore give note to the recent passing of filmmaker and artist Bruce Conner, who created mind-blowing re-edits of found-footage on 16mm way back when the Internet was but a mere twinkle in a Pentagon-subsidized computer engineer's eye. Conner was first known in Beat-era San Francisco for his collages, paintings and assemblages, but began making his mark on cinema in 1958 with A Movie, a stream-of-consciousness montage made from films purchased at a local camera store; its dreamlike structure, Conner later said, was influenced by TV channel-surfing. Later, Cosmic Ray (1961), an Atomic-bomb dance party set to Ray Charles's "What’d I Say", grooved to a Pop-political pulse and presaged the music video, while his powerfully minimalist Kennedy assassination study Report (1967) was one of the earliest artistic uses of serial looping and pure flicker, processes that became integral to structural filmmaking. Conner's later involvement with punk and New Wave resulted in one of his most famous works, a drop-dead brilliant film set to Devo's Mongoloid (1978), and collaborations elsewhere with David Byrne, Brian Eno and Toni Basil, among others. Conner left us earlier this week, following a long illness, but saw his legacy celebrated in a 2000 touring show, puckishly titled 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story Part II. So the next time you get psyched over the latest online video concoction by Oliver Laric or John Michael Boling, take a moment and think of Conner, who might someday be considered one of ...

Opening today, the online exhibition FW: Re: Re: explores a medium even our grandparents have become accustomed to: email. Organized by Rhizome's curatorial fellow Luis Silva from the ArtBase, FW: Re: Re: pulls together work produced over the past three years to present a variety of subversive approaches to this ubiquitous technology.

The relationship between sound and image has long entertained comparative theorists and geeks in both literary and music circles. Of course, this relationship keeps evolving with new technologies, and couplings between audio and the visual continue to grow, particularly in the context of live performances. But how do these two dyads manifest themselves in still forms? This is the question raised by "Frozen," an exhibition organized by Norwegian artist and curator Marius Watz, who has led the field of generative art with his own work, his Generator.x blog, and events focused on the work of others. The show is up through July 26th at Amsterdam's Melkweg Mediaroom, Paradiso, in conjunction with the 5 days off MEDIA festival. Everything included in it is the result of an assignment, which seems in keeping with an exhibition that responds to generative practices and computer-programmed processes. Artists Andreas Nicolas Fischer & Benjamin Maus; Leander Herzo; Daniel Widrig & Shajay Booshan; and Marius Watz have created digital prints and "audio sculptures" that respond to audioworks by Freiband and Alexander Rishaug. The artists have used techniques such as rapid prototyping, CNC, and laser cutting to make objects that map and visualize sound, in "frozen" form. Of course, these works may purport to stop time--existing almost like a single frame in a film strip--but they are utterly-time based, with the concept of frozen motion entirely scripted by the concept of time, and a processing of the structural qualities (timbre, tempo, rhythm, etc) of sounds informing the logic and form of the ultimate objects. A nice Flickr set documents the results which demonstrate both the diversity of ways in which sound can be interpreted and the fact that beauty still lies in the ear of the beholder. - Marisa OlsonImage: Marius Watz, Sound memory (Oslo Rain Manifesto), 2008 ...

Lumens is an installation of lamps networked across three spaces: Greylock Arts (Adams, MA), MCLA Gallery51 (North Adams, MA), and Turbulence.org. Scores of personal lamps that usually inhabit and illuminate the interiors of homes and shops have been borrowed from the residents of Adams and North Adams to fill the two gallery spaces. Their images and stories are represented on Turbulence.org, which also serves to connect the two locations telematically.

Clusters of lamps have been outfitted with proximity sensors and arduino microcontrollers. Lamps light up in response to a visitor's presence and simultaneously illuminate lamps in the counterpart spaces. Thus, an individual in Adams can communicate his/her presence to an individual in North Adams, and vice versa. Additionally, as visitors investigate the history of a particular lamp online, the lamp will light in the physical gallery space.

Lumens re-connects North Adams and Adams -- originally a single community -- through an exploration of location, influence, history, and the present.

Lumens is a project of Networked Realities: (Re)Connecting the Adamses, a collaboration between Greylock Arts, MCLA Gallery51, and Turbulence.org. It was made possible through New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the LEF Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. http://turbulence.org/networkedrealities[CONTINUED]

João Ribas is a curator and critic at the New York-based arts non-profit the Drawing Center. In addition to his tenure at this institution, he has curated multiple exhibitions elsewhere (at Artists Space, Bellwether, Guild and Greyshkul, among other spaces) and maintains the online platform Expanded Cinema. He recently curated a group exhibition at Andrew Kreps Gallery entitled "Standard Sizes" which "presents works that look to standards and formal procedures to displace the idea of expressive subjectivity as the domain of art." Arguing that individual subjective expression has become "deradicalized" due to its democratization, the show brings together a selection of works which converse with formulaic structures in an effort to disclose the bounds of expression in a culture emphasizing the articulation of the self. I recently spoke with Ribas about the exhibition, and the larger cultural context surrounding it. "Standard Sizes" closes this weekend, so if you're in New York, hot foot it to Chelsea! -- Ceci Moss

What lead you to the concept behind the show?

The concept comes out of a seminar I've been teaching on the emergence of an expressive subject---this radical individual will---out of Renaissance humanism, we know it more familiarly as Romantic genius, or the creative virility of Balzac or Courbet, and it emerges from within the same political economy that creates the inverted economy of art. The shift from guild-based work in the wake of mercantilism allows for a correlative assertion of certain new values--taste, genius, masterwork----put on the labor of the "artist" as a distinct self. This is a new kind of produced subjectivity, of pazzia or melancholy, with artworks as its objectification---part of my interest has been looking into the iconographic nature of this: the origins of the 'sketch' or the rhetorical use of certain painterly gestures in Dutch ...

Come to the New Museum tonight for this month's program in the New Silent Series, the Technology Readings. Beginning at 7:30PM, a group of New York comedians will perform readings on the joys and pitfalls of a technology-saturated culture. The evening will include:

Inwound plumbs the reciprocal exchanges between sound, location, and listeners at Postdamer Platz. In the first week of July, public access will be granted to a provisional listening chamber set up within the subterranean mechanical spaces of the Postdamer Platz station. The surrounding environmental vibrations at the site of the station will be reconfigured into an intensified relational field of sound. The project utilizes transducers that are literally plugged into the urban clutter. By attaching the transducers, the host structures become quasi-microphones listening outwards as well as in on themselves.

A selection of zones in and around the station will transmit their live signals to the chamber where they then get collected and emitted via a phased-array of suspended loudspeakers. Within the listening chamber, the various signals are brought into critical play as amplified material vibrations are interlaced with defamiliarized ambient sounds to form an immersive tapestry of sonic-spatial configurations.

By approaching the environment as sonically continuous and the site as materially unstable, Inwound empirically taps into the fluctuating undercurrents of everyday experience in order to render palpable the oscillations from which both 'listener' and 'place' emerge inherently interwound.